Steam for Linux

So I'm very excited about a native Linux client, but I don't want to have to give up all the Wine effort I've put in to making games work. Will there be a way to download and install Windows-only games and install them using Wine? Or will I still need to run a Wine-wrapped instance of Steam alongside my native Steam?

Hopefully we'll eventually have some sort of tool for it, though I don't expect much so as to encourage developers to make games *for* Linux, rather than games that might just happen to work on Linux after customers work around the various issues with it.

Either way, I can't wait for this. The native Steam client has been the one major thing keeping me anchored to Windows. I'm going to have to re-learn my way around the console. It's been too long.

This would be SO counter-producive. Lazy devs will say "oh, just use steam on wine! no need to port our game!"

LIMBO-style.

No seriously, we already have PlayOnLinux doing this job, and although it's fine for most of its users it doesn't work for everybody. If you still want to play Windows games, keep a Windows partition. It's not worth the hassle.

still would be nice feature to be able to run "windows" games from linux steam with wine command or something..like it or not but 90% of games will never get ported to linux ..at least not in the near future.and wine is fine for running many of the games. dualboot is useless..still need to have that crapos then

They didn't waste any time at all, the developments to make Steam games work better, still benefit the software as a whole. Remember, it's only Valve games that are currently supported, you'll still need Wine to run a majority of the games you'll want to play.

I hope there will be an easy way to add wine games, switching from wine steam to native steam would be very annoying.And to all those opposed, as long as it works well, I'm fine with games, a lot of games already work with wine, and there is no way most of the older games will be ported to wine.If the game runs perfectly with wine, it's no different than any other library. If a game use flash or adobe air (like some do), is it a native windows game ? wine is not an emulator.

I'm torn on this issue. Especially for older games, WINE is a great option to port the entire Steam library without developer involvement. For new releases it needs to be discouraged as much as possible but I don't want to lose my back catalog when I get rid of Windows.